Quotes
It was a dull way of giving—writing checks rather than, say, becoming an aid worker in a distant country. There was a moral glamour in throwing over everything and leaving home and going somewhere dangerous that compensated for all sorts of privations. There was no glamour in staying behind, earning money, and donating it. It certainly wasn’t soul-stirring, to be thinking about money all the time. But so much depended on money, they knew—it took a callous kind of sentimentality to forget that. Money well spent could mean years of life, and money spent badly meant years of life lost.
Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers drowning: grappling with impossible idealism, drastic choices, and the overpowering urge to help, New York, 2015, p. 89
Another pleasure at Harvard that year was the course on the poetry of Du Fu (Tu Fu), given by William Hung. In some ways, Hung’s scholarship was old-fashioned, but he not only was completely familiar with Du Fu’s poems but also had consulted English, German, and Japanese translations to discover what fresh insights had been provided by non-Chinese scholars. My most vivid memory of his teaching is of the time when he recited by heart one of Du Fu’s long poems. He recited the poem in the Fukien dialect, his own, which preserves the final consonants lost today in standard Chinese. As Hung recited, leaning back, tears filled his eyes.
Donald Keene, Chronicles of my life: an American in the heart of Japan, New York, 2008, p. 63
Not far from the British Museum was Gordon Square, where Arthur Waley live. Waley had been my inspiration for years—the great translator who had rendered The Tale of Genji into Japanese but also Chinese works. […]
Various people had told me that it was difficult to keep a conversation going with Waley. If he was bored, he did not take pains to conceal it. A friend related that on one occasion, when Waley had a particularly tedious visitor, he took two books from his shelf and invited the visitor to go with him to the park in Gordon Square and, seated on separate benches, read a book. Even though it did not take Waley long to decide whether or not it was worth conversing with another person, he was not the kind of snob who has interested only in important people. On the contrary, he had such a wide variety of acquaintances that he might be described as a collector of unusual people. If I happened to inform an Australian clavichordist or a group of Javanese dancers or a Swiss ski teacher that I taught Japanese literature, I might be asked if I knew Arthur Waley, a friend of theirs.
Waley was a genius. The word genius is sometimes used in Japan for any foreigner who can read Japanese, but Waley knew not only Japanese and Chinese but also Sanskrit, Mongol, and the principal European languages. Moreover, he knew these languages not as a linguist interested mainly in words and grammar but as a man with an unbounded interest in the literature, history, and religion of every part of the world. He loved poetry written in the language he knew, and if he did not know a language that was reputed to have good poetry, he did not begrudge the time needed to learn it. Late in life he learned Portuguese in order to read the poetry of a young friend.
Donald Keene, Chronicles of my life: an American in the heart of Japan, New York, 2008, pp. 71-72
Working on issues that affect us, that our friends work on, or that captivate our attention form good starting points for realizing the importance of working to create social change. It is to effective activism what recycling is to an environmentally sustainable lifestyle: it’s the place that pretty much everyone starts out at. But it shouldn’t be an end- point. Once we’ve developed the spirit of social concern, once we’ve seen the value in working to create a better world, we need to move forward in becoming more thoughtful about how we spend the limited amount of time and energy we have. We need to begin choosing our activist work from a utilitarian perspective: How can I do the most good? How can I reduce the most suffering and destruction of life? Slogans like “practice random acts of kindness” feel good and are easy to put into practice. But if we don’t take our activism more seriously than that, our motive is probably a desire to feel good about ourselves, to help ourselves or those close to us, or to act out our self-identity. The endpoint of authentic compassion is a desire to do the most good that one can, to be as effective as possible in creating a world with less suffering and destruction and more joy. Figuring out how we can do the most good takes careful thought over a long period of time, and it means moving into new and possibly uncomfortable areas of advocacy. But the importance of taking our activism seriously and approaching it from this utilitarian perspective cannot be overstated. It will mean a difference between life and death, between happiness and suffering, for thousands of people, for thousands of acres of the ecosystem, and for tens of thousands of animals.
Nick Cooney, Change of heart: What psychology can teach us about creating social change, New York, 2011, pp. 22
There are no irreversible situations or ’laws’ of history of the kind popularised as mistaken and dangerous old Marxist recipes. The outcomes in human affairs will always depend on what we are capable of doing every day. Paradoxically, communists and socialists who beat the drum of ‘historical determinism’ never thought they could leave history to roll in on the wheels of inevitability. Socialists in general work more diligently at influencing history than the supposed defenders of freedom.
Colleen Dyble (ed.), Taming Leviathan: Waging the War of Ideas Around the World, London, 2008, p. 159
Consider for a moment how you came to be doing the type of activist work you’re doing now. Which of the following better describes what led you down this path?(a) One day, or perhaps over a period of time, you thought to yourself: “I don’t like suffering and injustice. I don’t like unnecessary death and destruction. How can I reduce as much suffering and destruction of life as possible?”
(b) Personal or circumstantial reasons led you to do the type of work you do: the issue is interesting to you, the issue affects you and your loved ones personally, your friends are involved in this type of work, you had been hearing about it a lot in the media, etc.
Nick Cooney, Change of heart: What psychology can teach us about creating social change, New York, 2011, p. 20
Although people do usually seem to think of feminists as being committed to particular ideologies and activities, rather than to a very general belief that society is unjust to women, what is also undoubtedly true is that feminism is regarded by nearly everyone as the movement which represents the interests of women. This idea is perhaps even more deeply entrenched than the other, but it is a very serious matter for feminism that it should be thought of in both these ways at once. This is because of what seems to be an ineradicable human tendency to take sides. While it would be ideal if everyone could just assess each controversial problem on its own merits as it arose, what actually happens is that people usually start by deciding whose side they are on, and from then onwards tend to see everything that is said or done in the light of that alliance. The effects of this on the struggle for sexual justice have been very serious. The conflation of the idea of feminism as a particular ideology with that of feminism as a concern with women’s problems means that people who do not like what they see of the ideology (perhaps because they are keen on family life, or can’t imagine a world without hierarchies, or just don’t like unfeminine women) may also tend to brush aside, explain away, sneer at or simply ignore all suggestions that women are seriously badly treated. Resistance to the feminist movement easily turns into a resistance to seeing that women have any problems at all.
Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Sceptical Feminist: A Philosophical Enquiry, London, 1980, pp. 2-3
Morality in foreign policy isn’t about bombing bad guys. It’s about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won’t involve bombings at all.
No one thinks that they make bad jokes, but everyone knows some people that do, so there’s an obvious disconnect. Some people consistently make bad jokes, and don’t realize it. You might be one of these.
Tynan, Superhuman by habit, 2014
As he searched the physics literature on the long-term future of the universe, Dyson noticed that the available papers on the subject shared a certain strange peculiarity. “The striking thing about these papers,” Dyson recalled afterward, “is that they are written in an apologetic or jocular style, as if the authors were begging us not to take them seriously.”
It was not a proper use of your time, apparently, to imagine what might or might not happen to the universe some billions of years down the road—a prejudice that was rather surprising in view of the fact that many physicists nonetheless lavished huge amounts of recycled paper, time, and attention on what had happened billions of years in the past.
Ed Regis, Great mambo chicken and the transhuman condition: Science slightly over the edge, Reading, 1990, p. 270
Anyone reading Sigmund Freud’s original works might well be seduced by the beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition. But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence.
Nature, Psychology: A reality check, Nature, vol. 461, no. 7266, 2009, pp. 847, p. 847
To justify a policy to which one is attached on self-interested or ideological grounds, one can shop around for a causal or statistical model just as one can shop around for a principle. Once it has been found, one can reverse the sequence and present the policy as the conclusion. This process can occur anywhere on the continuum between deception and self-deception (or wishful thinking), usually no doubt closer to the latter.
Jon Elster, Securities against misrule: Juries, assemblies, elections, Cambridge, 2013, p. 5
[U]n homme politique […] cherche d’abord à discerner son intérêt, et à voir quels sont les intérêts analogues qui pourraient se grouper autour du sien; il s’occupe ensuite à découvrir s’il n’existerait pas par hasard, dans le monde, une doctrine ou un principe qu’on pût placer convenablement à la tête de la nouvelle association, pour lui donner le droit de se produire et de circuler librement.
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Paris, 1835, p. 2
It is maintained that a question does not make sense unless the questioner knows what kind of answer he is looking for. However, while the fact that the questioner knows the “outline” of the answer may be a strong or even conclusive reason for supposing that the question is meaningful, the converse does not hold. One can think of examples in which a question is meaningful although the person asking it did not know what a possible answer would look like. Thus somebody might ask “What is the meaning of life?” without being able to tell us what kind of answer would be relevant and at a later time, after falling in love for the first time, he might exclaim that he now had the answer to his question.
Paul Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, 1967
One of the key goals of feminism has been equity. That is, a man or a woman with the same set of aptitudes and motivations should have an equal chance of succeeding. We can endorse this without reservation. However, this does not mean that men and women on average actually have the same motivations, so we should not necessarily expect equal sex representation across all sectors of society. A second goal of feminism has been to celebrate and validate women’s values, which are often different from those of men. It is surely more important to value the pro-social orientation many women […] possess, than it is to lament that they are not more like men.
Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are, Oxford, 2007, pp. 181-182
Io credo, disse la Marchesa, riguardando alla facilità, con cui gli uomini si scordano di quegli oggetti, que presenti anno più degli altri nella mente, che anco nell’Amore si serbi questa proporzione de’ quadrati delle distanze de’ luoghi, o piuttosto de’ tempi. Così dopo otto giorni di assenza, l’Amore è divenuto sessanta quattro volte minor di quel che fosse nel primo giorno.
Francesco Algarotti, Il newtonianismo per le dame, ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce, i colori, e l'attrazione, Napoli [Venezia], 1739, pp. 244
Is it credible that my generation could be so special? Literally hundreds of generations have thought that they had the right moral values. Two thousand years ago, the Romans—the imperialistic, crucifying, slave-owning Romans—were congratulating themselves on being Bcivilized,^ because unlike the Bbarbarians^ they had abolished human sacrifice. This was genuine progress, but what they did not realize was that thousands of years’ additional progress remained to be made. We are in the same position: we know how much progress is embodied in our values, but not how much progress remains to be made in the future. This, then, is the Inductive Worry: most cultures have turned out to have major blind spots in their moral beliefs, and we are in much the same epistemic situation as they are, so we will probably also turn out to have major moral blind spots.
Evan G. Williams, The possibility of an ongoing moral catastrophe, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 18, no. 5, 2015, pp. 971–982, p. 974
[V]ague terms like “probably” and “likely” make it impossible to judge forecasts. When a forecaster says something could or might or may happening, she could or might or may be saying almost anything.
Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, New York, 2015, pp. 181-182
Myself and I continue to converse while I put the vacuum away in the hall closet. “You really should clean this closet,” I say, wandering into the thicket of ball gowns and coats and suits as if I’m heading for Narnia. I pick my way over several suitcases and climb up a ladder and down the other side, having realized that it is important to find my bathing suit right now, but I trip on a broken television and land with a thud in a pile of boxes. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t get me started,” I shout, and crawl back out, finding my hiking boots on the way. I go down the hall to collect all my shoes. “The thing is, probably everyone talks to themselves now and then, don’t they?” I sweep everything off the closet shelves and begin arranging my heels in order of color and height. “But perhaps they don’t talk to themselves quite this much. Time to do the laundry!” Abandoning the shoes, I pull all the bedclothes off the bed, upending cats, and go out my back door and down the staircase of my condo, singing a little laundry song, and I trail through the basement with my quantities of linens, note that my laundry song has taken on a vaguely Baroque sort of air, and note further that, to my regret, I do not play harpsichord, though my first husband’s mother did, but she was really fucking crazy, and once called me a shrew. “A shrew!” I cry. “Can you imagine! Who says shrew?” I laugh almost as hard as I did when she said it. I continue my efforts to stuff my very large, very heavy brocade bedspread into the relatively small washer. “Perhaps it won’t fit,” I murmur, concerned, but then realize that if I just leave the lid open, the washer will, in its eminent wisdom, suck in the bedspread in its chugging, “obviously,” I say, rolling my eyes at my own stupidity. I pour half a bottle of laundry soap over the bedspread and turn the washer on. I stuff the sheets and attendant cases, pillows, etc. in the other washer and wander back upstairs. “I’ve locked myself out,” I say grimly. “Fucking idiot.” I lean my forehead against the door and become curious as to whether I can achieve perfect balance by tilting myself just right, “On the tips of my toes, with the forehead just so, and she does it!” I cry, balancing there. “People, she does it again! Will she never cease to amaze!” I shake my head in wonder, and laugh riotously. “Probably time to stop talking,” I murmur. My neighbor comes out his back door with a bag of garbage. Real casually, I lean my cheek against the door and sort of right myself with a shove of my face. Hi! I wave dramatically, as if he is far away. He smiles nervously. I can’t decide if he smiles nervously because I am acting weird, or because he is getting his PhD in philosophy, which would make anyone nervous.
Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life, New York, 2008, pp. 230-231
It was a common platitude—during the boom years of the 1980s—that Japan was the future and that America needed to follow and learn from Japan. The funny thing is, those claims might have been true, but in the opposite direction of how they were intended. Japan is an object lesson in how to live with a slow-growth economy.
Tyler Cowen, The great stagnation: How America ate all the low-hanging fruit of modern history, got sick, and will (eventually) feel better, 2011, p. 87